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Women pass an ad for The Sun tabloid outside News International’s Wapping headquarters in London. (Reuters)
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Feb. 11: Senior executives at the Sun newspaper who were closely associated with former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks have been arrested on suspicion of making illegal payments to police officers.
The journalists were detained in a series of dawn raids after information was handed to Scotland Yard by News Corporation, the tabloid’s parent company.
Sources within Rupert Murdoch’s powerful publishing group described the process as “draining the swamp”.
One of the arrested journalists is believed to be Fergus Shanahan, 57, who was Rebekah Brooks’s deputy during her editorship of The Sun from 2003 to 2009, and who now works as a comment writer.
Another executive said to have been arrested is Graham Dudman, 49, who held a series of senior jobs with the Sun and was promoted from an assistant editor role to managing editor under Brooks in 2004.
He was made editorial development director for News International in June last year, and also serves as a board member of the Society of Editors.
Chris Pharo, 42, who was promoted by Brooks from news editor to head of news in 2007, is also believed to have been arrested, along with Mike Sullivan, 48, the paper’s long-serving crime editor.
A source familiar with the workings of News Corporation’s Management and Standards Committee (MSC), set up last July to oversee the company’s response to the police investigation, said: “This is a mark of the absolute determination of News Corporation to drain the swamp.”
Police from the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Elveden, set up to investigate illegal payments to officers, searched The Sun newsroom in Wapping, east London, for evidence after the early morning arrests. The journalists’ homes were also searched.
When Brooks appeared in front of a Commons committee in 2003, she was asked by Chris Bryant MP whether her newspaper had been involved in improper activities. Brooks replied: “We have paid the police for information in the past.”
Andy Coulson, her successor as News of the World editor who later worked as David Cameron’s director of communications, rapidly moved to suggest to the committee that any payments were made “within the law”.
The evidence of alleged police payments are contained in a series of emails passed by News International to the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, shortly after Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s royal reporter was jailed for phone hacking in 2007.
That file was subsequently passed to the Met police only in June last year, prompting questions about a widespread cover-up at a very senior level of illegal payments to police.
The emails are alleged to show that phone hacking went far beyond the activities of “one rogue reporter” — as News international had once insisted — and that payments to officers appeared to have been authorised by senior executives between 2003 and 2007.
The News of the World was shut down last July after it was implicated in the phone hacking scandal.
Brooks resigned as News International chief executive the following week. Two days later she was arrested and questioned by police investigating payments to police and the phone hacking scandal, before being bailed.
A News Corporation spokesman said: “News Corporation made a commitment last summer that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past would not be repeated.
“It commissioned the MSC to undertake a review of all News International titles, regardless of cost, and to proactively co-operate with law enforcement and other authorities if potentially relevant information arose at those titles.
“As a result of that review, which is ongoing, the MSC provided information to the Elveden investigation which led to today’s arrests. No comment can be made on the nature of that information to avoid prejudicing the investigation and the rights of individuals.”
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